Satyagraha

Good Friday 2000 was the day on which I decided that I no longer wished or needed to be addicted to opiates. I wandered directionless and plain to see and eventually I found myself on southern Dartmoor. As I turned round to look back at the City of Plymouth I witnessed a vision of nuclear apocalypse all across the Sound, and the noise of percussion became deafening. The triad of mushroom clouds billowed towards me like great swathes of dark doom monstrosity. I understood that this was not the result of an enemy strike, but the result of internal sabotage, and I understood that the forces at work in my own country were as catastrophic as those elsewhere. I wandered deeper into Dartmoor and it was here by Rook Tor that I heard the voice of the universe. Her voice was a measureless expanse of deep calm and wondrous love and she eased the perturbations that the visions I had just witnessed had elicited within my soul. She told me that I was her baby, and she said this as only a mother would say this, and this I understood. She then told me that the universe would not expand into nothingness, neither would it collapse back in on itself, but that the universe breathed, outwards and inwards, for all time. This I did not understand.



© Chris Bond — 17 June 2002


True story.